Items in pnews.paradox-articles

Subject:

Rick Kelly - WIN API Printer Controls

Date:

Mon, 8 May 2006 08:56:52 -0500

From:

"Roger Engdahl" <rogersworkshop@direcway.com>

Newsgroups:

pnews.paradox-articles

Hi Rick (and anyone else who may have suggestions),
Thanks for the articles on using API calls to set printers.
I have an application (P7/32) out there for an industrial tools distributor
who is running 4 separate companies at the same time in the same software.
His users switch from one company to another many times during the day
depending on what the customer wants. Internally, not all customers have
access to all companies. Orders are linked to a company. That's about it
except ...
Each of the companies have their own set of printers (laser printers, label
printers, color printers and pdf printers)
the users don't have to select printers or trays or anything else, each
print job is sent to the appropriate printer and when required the paper
tray is selected (white of internal, yellow for orders, three color collated
paper for invoices, etc)
Printers are all on the network at IP addresses.
This has worked for several years without too much trouble. Win 98 seemed
to switch printers and set options fast enough. They are all on WinXP Pro
or (a couple remote users) on Win 2K TS/Citrix -- much slower.
In this new and updated environment, printer functionality via Paradox is
very slow.
So I wanted to look at your API methods. They work perfectly changing the
default Windows printer and its settings. Paradox sees what ever is the
Windows default printer as the default printer when it starts up but doesn't
seem to get the message when the API calls set the Win Default to something
else. It hangs on to whatever it saw when starting up.
Is there something I am missing here or need to do differently?2
I noticed that even though I am running XP sp2 the version reported has a
major version = 4 and a minor version =0 (NT). I forced it to return WinXP.
It did not change the final result.
I appreciate any help you might be able to offer.
Thanks.
-----------------------------------------
Roger Engdahl
roger.pdxdev@earthlink.net